Usually the recruitment agencies are rather small, and their employees are numbered within a range from 4 to 60 persons [87]. However, the recruitment agency’s size per se is not the quality index: the small-size agencies of national scale are known, as well as local multi-office agencies [117].
A lot of questions is closed on the director and solved directly with him. Some authors see any advantages in such style, for instance, responsiveness (49), personal and business links in the branch [38,112]. However, others approve, not unfounded, the merger and structuring of agencies, as well as their specialization, when any professional group exceeds 25-30% of the total number of orders [5, 7, 23, 46, 64, 65, 70, 72, 78, 102]. Absence of specialists in any required business area shall be compensated by availability of specialized companies-partners capable to render professional consultation and/or assessment of nominees [117].
Some sources indicate consumers’ tendency to work with a concrete recruitment agency’s consultant, the most pleasant one for them [111]: “the company’s personnel manager hands over his work to the recruitment agency’s consultant, but he remains in charge of the final result. And he would like to look in eyes of the man, responsibility for activity of which he has undertaken”. As to the agency, there is a direct danger for it to lose the operating quality at possible resignation of this “irreplaceable” employee [60]. “Therefore many agencies develop their planes of succession…, involving all the key employees. In this case the knowledge and properties are being identified to be possessed by the successor, and possible candidates of required or expected qualification are being reserved”[59].
The recruitment agency shall not receive a great shock at opening that a new arrived employee has his “own” consumers and may depart also with them. As one of the possible options according to [113], the newly hired employee should compose a list of his “own” consumers, whom he has right to “take away”. Besides, the employee and recruitment agency’s manager should sign an agreement on mutual obligations to keep the confidential information including obligation of the employee not to “take away” any recruitment agency’s consumers.
Majority of recruitment agencies has hierarchical organizational structure of two or (rarely) three levels. In small agencies the director is not only manager, but also “playing coach”, PR-responsible and marketer. The recruitment agency staff is divided usually along three ways: companies, nominees and development of technologies [85]. No other models of internal interrelations were found within a framework of this review (not speaking on their analysis). The theme of recruitment agency employees’ motivation is considered probably uninteresting or confidential. In any case only some traces [22, 85] were found on this subject at composing the review.
to be continued…